KineRAW MINI – portable 2K RAW for $3000

by Sebastian WöberApril 11^th, 2013

After Kineraw recently started shipping their first 4K cinema camera they just presented their new Kineraw MINI here at NAB: A portable camera that delivers a very brilliant 2K RAW image from a 4K sensor. It costs $3000 and it will start shipping in a month.

Just when we thought NAB had not much more to offer than a lot of hype around 4K, we found ourselves spending over an hour at the booth of Chinese cinema camera maker KINERAW. Read on to understand why.

Many people (including myself) look at the Chinese company KineRAW with a little bit of hesitation. They appeared out of nowhere and came up with a very bold product: A 4K cinema camera that delivers professional grade images similar to cameras that cost 10 times as much. But is the camera reliable and ergonomic as others?

Does it really work in the field and deliver what a cinematographer needs? That is a question that remains to be answered in real world testing situations. We will definitely keep a close eye at KineRAW’s products.

After talking to the manufacturer and technical / cinematographic advisor Dan Hudgins though (he was closely involved in the development of the camera) we got a feeling that a lot of thought and ideas have gone in the development of these products. The images they presented were stunning and convincing (we hope they will be online soon) and the KineRAW products are definitely not just some cheap Alexa knock-off as they have been referred to. They are cinematic tools that have been crafted from the ground up with a very low pricetag and a high technical standard in mind.

The KineRAW MINI camera has a slot for one SSD harddisk and shoots its data in the famous cinemaDNG format directly to it. There are hdmi outputs but these do NOT output a feed that could be recorded, they output a 720p 8bit 50i signal as far as I can remember which is only suitable for monitoring. So it seems like you will have to go with the internal RAW which fills a 64GB drive in 15 minutes. Not ideal for run and gun shooting, but the realtime debayering and backup into cineform (compressed) on a laptop was recommended by the manufacturer as a workflow.

Technical Specs
– Super35mm sized 4K sensor
– Records: Uncompressed RAW / cinemaDNG (12 bit)
– Resolution: 2K / 1080p / 720p
– ISO max: 20480
– lots of LUT options (very customizable)
– audio-in, no phantom support
– weight 1.5kg (EF) / 1.9kg (KineMOUNT)
– 23.976 / 24 / 25 fps in 2K and 60 fps in 720p